From the category archives:

Opinion

The hidden cost of building

February 23, 2010
piggy bank - what does continuous integration cost you?

Thanks to EJ Ciramella for this thought provoking post. There’ll be a Build Doctor T-Shirt on it’s way to him soon.
In this down economy, irrespective of size of company involved, people want to save money, limit costs and increase throughput of their systems. One area of savings is the build and continuous integration [...]

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Sticking plaster over a gaping wound

January 4, 2009
Thumbnail image for Sticking plaster over a gaping wound

Another thing that I learned in 2008: the build manager can’t be responsible for ensuring the quality of the code that they build and deploy. We had QA’s but there were loads of little things to check: Were the release instructions accurate? Was there a rollback process? Did all the scripts actually work?
I did have [...]

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Your version control system is not a file system

August 22, 2008

If you find yourself needing to check binary files into your Version Control System, something isn’t right. Your VCS is optimised for tracking changes to source files. When you have multiple revisions of a source file, the VCS has stored the original file and the changes between revisions. This is good.
When you [...]

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NAnt vs Ant: locations (NAnt Rant)

May 29, 2008

(Image taken from Nesster’s Photostream)

I think it was 2002 when Dan North took me under his wing and showed me the location attribute of Ant. That was then. Now, I’m doing a lot of .NET build engineering. And I’m dying for this feature. Here’s an Ant build to demonstrate:

<project default=”properties”>
<target name=”properties”>
[...]

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